I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Yet more bad news about disks

Chris Mellor at The Registerreviews the prospects for the 4TB disk generation and reports that manufacturers are finding the transition to the technologies it needs more difficult and expensive than expected.

2 comments:

There is also bad news about flash memory too. Henry Newman and Jeffrey Layton explain the reasons why, even if semiconductor processes stay on their road-map of improvement, this will not produce corresponding improvements in flash memory capacity per chip.

Of course, it may be that these difficulties simply provide the opportunity for alternative technologies such as Memristors and Phase Change Memory to capture the solid state memory market. And if, as with FAWN, reducing the power and cooling costs of storage and query processing is what is driving adoption of solid state memory, the capacity per chip may not be critical.